Gold felt heavy in her cloth seat. The webbing pressed into the back of her thighs, and she assumed the chopper was climbing. Beneath the cloud layer, the helicopters fluttered along in almost total darkness. Gold saw no terrain down below, just pure black. Then a break in the overcast admitted a shaft of moonlight bright enough to reveal mountains passing underneath the aircraft.
Inside, she noted crew members pointing, checking charts and a photomap. Someone cranked his interphone volume way up, and Gold overheard squelched voices—pops and hums and commands. But with her own headset not connected, she could make out no words clearly.
The moonlight yielded to the whims of the clouds. Light faded, brightened, and faded once more. Gold felt blind and deaf, suspended between mountains and moon. Almost like a ghost: able to move in the world, but unable to alter physical reality to her satisfaction.
In the next pool of pale light, she noticed a hillside dotted with qalats—mud houses with adjoining stone fences for animals. A lamp shone in one window; otherwise the village was dark. The village had a name, no doubt, though probably not one indicated on U.S. charts. Too insignificant for that.
She considered the inhabitants, wondered about their fates and their pasts. Had they suffered in the earthquake? More than likely. Had they lost loved ones in the wars and coups since 1979? Almost certainly; every family had. Gold felt responsible for each life down there, though she knew that made no sense. Her conscience outweighed her powers, her ability to bring about change.
You’ve spent so much time here, she told herself, that part of you will never leave. Her mind had absorbed the language, the customs, the history, so thoroughly that if a neurosurgeon wanted to separate the American from the Afghan in her, he would not know where to make the cut.
She thought of lines from a poem by Kipling. They had stayed with her because she had lived them:
The helicopters crossed a ridge, and the village disappeared behind them. The land grew dark once more. The choppers banked, leveled, banked again. After several minutes of flying in blackness, Gold saw where the cloud layer overhead split wide. Through the opening, moonlight shone like a diffused and filtered sunrise, dawn on some shrouded planet in another galaxy.
The moon held low on the horizon, red and near full. Its peaks and craters, plains and false seas loomed so near that the lunar terrain appeared as if on a relief map.
The sight eased Gold’s mind. The apparent nearness of another world served as a subtle reminder, or perhaps an assurance: Someone is in charge, Sergeant Major. And it’s not you.
She began scanning outside. Gold could see well enough to make out tributary creeks twisting through the network of valleys below. Soon she noticed a change in the tone of engines and rotors, and she felt the Pave Hawk slow down. It banked a few degrees to the left, then made a full left circle. Chatter rose on the interphone and radios, but like before, she could overhear only an unintelligible crackle of voices.
When the aircraft flew straight and level again, she noticed a strange light up ahead. A green glow emanated in a perfectly round shape. The light pulsed and wavered, and Gold imagined it would appear much brighter to the crew members on NVGs. In a moment, she realized what it was: a buzz-saw signal, commonly used to hail aircraft at night. It looked like no other light source, and it was low-tech and dependable. Troops made it by cracking a chemical light stick, tying it to a few feet of parachute cord, and spinning it over their heads.
If they were signaling that way, Gold thought, they must be confident the landing zone was secure. You wouldn’t twirl a light if you thought bad guys lurked nearby. The air strike had probably taken care of all threats.
She wanted to get Parson on board and out of there immediately. Now she knew he was safe, and that was fine. But she’d feel a lot better with him strapped in beside her.
The Pave Hawks clattered over the valley; Parson could see them in the full moon even with all their lights off. Good thing that Spectre had laid waste to the insurgents so thoroughly. With this much illumination, the helicopters would have made tempting targets for a bad guy with a shoulder-launched missile.
Just to Parson’s left, Reyes spun the light stick. Rashid and the crew chief still manned the PKM, though nothing had moved anywhere near them since the gunship did its work. Sergeant Sharif and the wounded civilian lay inside the Mi-17. Reyes had spread a poncho over Conway’s body. Parson held the radio; he’d been told the Pave Hawks were bringing more pararescuemen, as well as Gold. He took one more call from the lead Pave Hawk.
“Golay,” the pilot said, “we have your buzz saw. Can you confirm the LZ’s still cold?”
“Affirmative,” Parson said. “There’s a flat spot on this ledge big enough for one helo. Surface winds are still gusting, but they’re better than they were.” With nothing to measure wind speed and direction, he could describe the weather only in the most general terms.
“Pedro Two-Four copies all. We’ll come in one at a time.”
That decision made sense to Parson. One chopper could fly overwatch with gunners at the ready as the other picked up downed crew members. Landing would go quicker than having the Pave Hawks hover while taking up survivors on the hoists. Parson didn’t feel like swinging from a damned cable anyway. A wave of fatigue came over him; he was getting too old for this. He thought his years of military service were wearing him away like the brake discs on landing gear, a little less of him left after each mission.
Parson waved his hand under his throat, a signal that Reyes could stop spinning the light stick. The PJ let the stick rattle to the ground. He rolled up the parachute cord over the plastic stick and stuffed it all into a cargo pocket on his leg. As he worked, he looked uncomfortable. He kept pausing, bending forward, adjusting the straps and buckles on his body armor. The armor had saved Reyes’s life, but he probably suffered a deep, sore bruise underneath it, maybe even some cracked ribs.
Been there, Parson thought. He, too, had experienced the sledgehammer of a bullet striking Kevlar. Force equaled mass times acceleration, and acceleration was a bitch.
But soreness beat the hell out of a slug through the chest. A flight surgeon once told him how the gunshot wounds of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars resembled those of Civil War survivors—mainly injuries to the limbs. Back then, if you got shot in the torso you just died. In the present day, you had body armor, and you weren’t seriously hurt. So those who showed up in hospitals, then and now, had taken bullets to the arms and legs. Except the really unlucky ones who got shot in the head or had a bullet get under the Kevlar by entering at the shoulder.
Conway, of course, had become another kind of exception. What a damnable shame, Parson thought, for him to survive the Gulf War, then come here to help and lose his life in a firefight.
As the first helicopter approached the ledge, Parson wondered if that aircraft carried Gold. The lead Pave Hawk thudded over the ledge and threw billows of grit into the air. Parson turned his face from the stings, waited for the pitch of the rotor blades to change. The other chopper orbited the mountain, its metal skin bronzed by moonlight.